Diesel Civil Trust

The mad geniuses at DARPA have their next project lined up: a camera that can guide itself and report back from the field.

That kind of visual intelligence has been an exclusively human trait, until now. The plan, called “The Mind’s Eye,” is going to be outlined next at a one-day conference in DC in late April. The hope is to make up for human weaknesses, like fatigue or bias, that can result in unreliable intelligence. These cameras will be endowed with both the intellect to process a scene and the imagination to contextualize and describe it.

thinkmexican:

Killings Fuel Concern Over Mexico’s Drug Offensive 

The killing of an American consulate worker and her husband over the weekend in the shadow of the bridge that links this ramshackle city with the United States has become a public symbol of the mounting concern here that President Felipe Calderon’s strategy for attacking Mexico’s drug cartels is veering far off course.

The city braced for a visit on Tuesday from Mr. Calderón, who has been forced by the relentless violence here to recalibrate his approach and acknowledge that merely concentrating firepower on the drug gangs is not working.

In an about-face, the Mexican government has begun refocusing much of its energy on attacking social issues in Ciudad Juárez, in what officials say privately could be an experiment for other Mexican cities that are consumed by drug violence.

American officials say they have encouraged and supported the new approach, pointing to the lack of opportunity here.

United States officials reiterated on Monday their support for Mr. Calderón’s battle against Mexico’s drug gangs, which first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have backed with more than $1 billion in aid. The money has been spread across an array of agencies charged with fighting the drug war. It has bought helicopters for the army, X-ray equipment for customs, training for judges and a new police academy for federal police recruits.

Read Full Story, Here.

- via nytimes.com 

thinkmexican:

Three people connected to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, were killed in two drive-by shootings, a senior White House official told CNN Sunday.

Two of the victims were an American employee at the consulate and her U.S. citizen husband. The husband of a Mexican employee of the consulate was also killed. The shootings happened Saturday afternoon, the official said.

The American couple, identified by Mexican authorities only as a woman about 25 years old and a man around 30, were found dead inside a white Toyota RAV4 with Texas license plates, according to the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office.

The woman was shot in the neck and left arm, while the man had a bullet wound near his right eye, officials said.

“We know that the U.S. citizens were targeted,” Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told CNN, saying a police officer witnessed a car shooting at the Americans’ car. “We know they were chasing them. We know they wanted to kill them.”

Read More, Here.

- via cnn.com

Mark Skoda, one of the organizers of the first-ever national Tea Party convention in Nashville, is no revolutionary. “I get irritated when people say, ‘Let’s take our country back.’ We have a country,” he told one interviewer at the three-day-long gathering earlier this month…

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